This month, the South Whidbey Historical Society is premiering at its Langley museum two new exhibits that are rich with details about Whidbey Island’s recent history.

The exhibits — called Baby Island and South Whidbey Fishing Resorts — feature life on the island as it was in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s. Back then, South Whidbey was a wild and wooly place, with only a few rutted, gravel roads on the south end and a small car ferry from Mukilteo. Whidbey’s year-round residents were, for the most part, a hardy lot. They made their livings as farmers, loggers, fishermen, ferry employees, with a few school teachers, ministers and shop owners thrown in.

Many of the photographs in the resort exhibit are taken from a movie shot by 13-year-old Bill Hunziker, whose father was a ferry boat captain.

“I made the film during 1935 and 1936 — it’s a travelogue from the north end of the island to our house at Columbia Beach,” said Hunziker, who lives in Seattle. “The roads were like washboards then.”

Hunziker’s best friend was Seattle’s Larry Jones, whose family operated the Jones Fishing Resort, one mile north of the ferry dock along the beach. The pair met when they were in first grade at Deer Lake School.

“We didn’t have a camera and the resort is long gone,” Jones said. “So I built miniature cabins and a lodge from memory, complete with vintage cars, for the exhibit. I think I came pretty close to what it actually looked like.”

During the years resorts like these were open, South Whidbey was one of the most popular destinations for sport fishermen and fisherwomen from Seattle. The waters surrounding the island were teeming with big king salmon, clams and mussels were abundant, and there was no possession limit. Boats crowded the waters off Double Bluff, Bush Point, Baby Island, Possession Point, Bells Beach, Dines Point and Old Clinton Beach. Fishing derbies were commonplace and, according to people who lived or visited the resorts, the air was perfumed with the smell of freshly caught, smoked and baked fish. Visitors spent evenings around campfires talking about the big one that got away while children ran on the beach

Someone who remembers those days gone by is Langley’s Don Goodfellow whose family’s resort is featured in the exhibit. Don was only 7 months old when he moved to Whidbey. His father, Art Goodfellow Sr., was a Seattle banker.

“Dad lost everything in the stock market crash, had a nervous breakdown and decided to buy a fishing resort on Whidbey Island,” Goodfellow said.

His father brought his wife, Janet, 7-month-old Don, and Don’s older brother, Art Jr., to the east shore of Holmes Harbor in 1929. They bought the resort directly across from Baby Island and named it Art Goodfellow’s Baby Island Resort.

“It was on seven acres with our main house, 14 cabins, six outhouses, 40 boats and motors and a big long dock,” Goodfellow said. “It was a long way from Seattle.”

Don, now 72, said his mother hated the island in the beginning, but later learned to love their life on Whidbey.

“She was a society gal from Seattle, so life on a fishing resort was hard,” Goodfellow said. “She cleaned the cabins, and we all did a lot of work. The youngest — me — had to clean the outhouses.”

Cabin rental was inexpensive by today’s standards, $1.50 per day, 16-foot cedar planked boats were $3, and it was another $1.50 for a small motor. There were also two double cabins with three rooms each that rented for $5 a night.

The work was year-round, Goodfellow said. “We had to cut and split wood, recaulk the boats and do general maintenance on the property and cabins during the winter months.”

The resort usually opened on Washington’s Birthday weekend

“When we had guests, I was up at 3:30 a.m. to wake the fishermen and get them going,” Goodfellow said. “Then around 9 a.m. my dad would spell me and I would get a few hours rest.”

“We learned how to work hard. It was a good place to grow up.”

Goodfellow’s father sold the resort in 1947, but lived on Whidbey Island until his death in 1970. Janet Goodfellow died in 1948 at age 59.

Goodfellow graduated from Langley High School in 1947. He is retired.

Baby Island, the other new exhibit, features life on and around the little islet, which is located off the northeast shore of Holmes Harbor. The place packs a big wallop of history, complete with intrigue, rum-runners and gambling — and even a little romance.

Although Baby Island has had many owners, one of the most colorful was Darrel Scott, who purchased it in September 1923. Injured in World War I when his troopship was torpedoed off the coast of Scotland and sank, Scott was rescued and spent a good deal of time in a hospital recouperating. Against the advice of his doctors, he left the hospital to do what he liked best — camp, fish and hunt around Holmes Harbor. He took up residence on Baby Island and began to shape it into a fishing lodge and full-time home for himself.

Scott shared the island with migrating birds and sea life of all kinds. Beside Scott’s regular clientele of fishermen, off-season visitors included men doing log patrol work. During Prohibition, Scott often observed rum-runners in Saratoga Passage try to elude the Coast Guard and prosection in their speedy boats.

During one cold winter, when Holmes Harbor was a sheet of ice, Scott rescued men from one of the vessels carrying contraband liquor by shoving his boat ahead of him. The rescued men left him a “liquid” thank you gift.

Reputedly an excellent pool player, but a poor poker player, Scott lost the resort in the mid-1930s in a card game at the Dog House Saloon.

One of the island’s owners, M. Hoard of Seattle, built a bulkhead to stave off erosion of the island. By 1959 the buildings on the island were no longer in use, and the gap between Whidbey and Baby Island was widening.

It’s believed that Baby Island was connected to Whidbey at one time.

In 1963 a group of visitors were careless with a campfire, and it burned the bulkhead and remaining buildings.

Erosion of the island continues today. Baby Island is now about 80 feet wide and 300 feet long.

On Oct. 8, 1993, the Tulalip Tribes of Marysville bought the Island from Leslie Rucker of San Francisco, returning it to tribal ownership for shellfish harvesting.